Conrad
Gesner

The first tulips in Europe were described by Conrad Gesner
(1516-1565), a Swiss botanist and encyclopedist who had seen
one in April 1559 in the garden of an Augsburg magistrate. "Tulip in the
Garden of Johann Heinrich Herwart" depicts what to Gesner looked like a
red lily, which he called Tulipa turcarum. One still can read his
scribbled notes about the flower. Two years later in 1561, it was published as
a wood block print in his De Hortis Germaniae
Liber Recens, the first European illustration of
the tulip.

Notice below that, as was typical for the time, the original sketch was
drawn as seen, with the result that the woodblock print is reversed.

The popular notion is that Busbecq introduced the tulip to Europe.
If so, the bulbs would have had to be
sent from Constantinople within a few months of his arrival there early in
1555 and
planted in Bavaria later that autumn. Too, given the popularity of the flower by
the time of Busbecq's death in 1592, he likely would have claimed credit for
its introduction if he thought he had done so, especially since his letters
were composed long after he purportedly wrote them. Growing in areas long
visited by the Crusaders, it is as likely that tulips were brought in through
trade. The introduction of the tulip to the Netherlands, at least, can
be attributed to the botanist Carolus Clusius. In 1753, Linnaeus named the ornamental tulip after Gesner,
which still is known as Tulipa gesneriana.

"He [Pliny the Elder] made extracts of everything he read,
and always said that there was no book so bad that some good could not be
got out of it."

Pliny the Younger, Letters (III.5.10)

Gesner also published Bibliotheca Universalis
(1545-1555) in four volumes, a bibliography intended to include all known
literature, comprising approximately three thousand authors and ten thousand
titles. The intention was to compile a complete list of works in Latin, Greek,
and Hebrew "extant or not, ancient and more recent down to the present day,
learned and not, published and hiding in libraries." There was a sense that
this knowledge might be lost to posterity, especially when Buda in Hungary was
sacked by the Ottoman Turks in 1526 and the fabled library of Matthias
Corvinus ("The Raven King"), who had reigned from 1458 to 1490, was dispersed.
(The manuscript of Heliodorus' Aethiopica, the earliest Greek romance,
survived.)

Because the bibliography was intended to be exhaustive, even
books that might have been censured were listed so that the less educated
could be warned of them. Because not all the books in the world could be read,
it was thought, too, that only the best should be. Ironically, the
Bibliotheca itself was placed on the Vatican's list of prohibited books
and used by the censors of the Church as a primary source for its Index
Librorum Prohibitorum (the Pauline Index of 1559). It was a task made all
the more easy since Gesner, himself a Protestant, had indexed titles by
subject, including theology (which comprised all of the third volume) and
philosophy.

References: Tuliomania:
Money, Honor, and Knowledge in the Dutch Golden Age (2007)
by Anne Goldgar; Tulipomania (1950)
by Wilfrid Blunt; Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before
the Modern Age (2010) by Ann M. Blair..